The costs of the war in Iraq, its technology -- and
simultaneous events taking place virtually unnoticed in the Congo..

"After Iraq: Dark Roads"May 23, 2003

Huck Gutman

THE war in Iraq is over. US President George W Bush has
proclaimed victory. At present, his administration it is trying to govern
and reconstruct post-war Iraq. But the results are sorry. Crime is rampant
in Baghdad, electricity and water unreliable at best. Former Baath Party
functionaries – despite Saddam Hussein’s defeat – often appear to have US
support in the ‘‘reconstruction’’ effort.

The war has not been without its costs. A month ago I
attended the funeral of a US Marine who was born and raised in the small
city of Burlington in Vermont. He was one of a small number of American casualties
among the 20,000 who died, most of them Iraqis. He died bravely, fighting
for his country, answering his nation’s call. The funeral service was moving.
His grandfather, a rabbi, confessed in his grief” “I cannot tell you what
God says of this. I cannot hear Him.”

My own thoughts were of how great had been the promise
of a life suddenly ended. It has always been thus: in every military conflict,
the majority of those who die in uniform are young. The writer Herman Melville
noted this almost a hundred and fifty years ago, in the midst of the American
Civil War: “Whence should come the trust and cheer?/ Youth must its ignorant
impulse lend – /Age finds place in the rear./All wars are boyish, and are
fought by boys,/ The champions and enthusiasts of the state.” As speakers
at the funeral came forward to share their memories of the young man, it
became clear how much still lay ahead of him, how much life seemingly had
in store, when his life was tragically cut short.

As I thought of his death, it was but a short mental step
to reflecting on the Iraqi lives similarly ended – of young soldiers who
like the American I was mourning would now never find wives or watch their
children grow, who would never encounter the joys and sorrows of experiencing
their own lives unfold. Like those mourning around me, Iraqi cousins and
friends were plunged into grief. And like the American parents whom I beheld
in their mourning, Iraqi mothers and fathers too faced a loss truly inconsolable,
feeling life close around them so tightly that it would never fully open
again.

No one has a monopoly on loss and grief. Tragedy multiplies
geometrically among friends and relations on both sides. The sorrows of those
who mourn the fallen on the victorious side are not greater – nor any less
– than the sorrows of those who mourn those fallen in a losing cause. Flag
waving, either as fervid preparation for war or as a concluding sign of victory,
does not erase in the slightest the terrible void left in the hearts of those
whose family or friends perished on the fields of battle.

Yet loss and bereavement are consequences of every war.
What, in particular, has marked this recent war ‘‘to liberate Iraq and free
the world of a source of weapons of mass destruction’’?

Despite the young man whose funeral I attended, there
were few American casualties. Despite great fears that the war would lead
to a devastating number of civilian deaths in Iraq, this was not the case.

Since the above statement is so contrary to what many expected, let me repeat
it, even at the risk of redundancy. Despite great fears that the war would
lead to a devastating number of civilian deaths, this was not the case. Still,
there’s no question that every mother, every friend, of the 20,000 who died
has been grievously affected by the war, and no one should minimize their
grief and loss.

BUT while this war was going on, another war was continuing.
The civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo began in 1998 with a Rwandan
invasion of that country. In the four-and-a-half years since then, as the
International Rescue Committee recently reported, “at least 3.3 million people
died in excess of what would normally be expected in this time.” Casualties
have been greater than in any conflict since World War II. Nor are the Lendu
and the Hema finished with their attempt to wipe each other out. They have
displaced half a million people in the small eastern Ituri region alone –
a situation fueled, one imagines, not merely by ethnic rivalry, but also
because this region is home to the world’s richest goldfield, the Kilo Motu,
and is already the locus of significance for oil exploration. (The imperial
drive for economic wealth – Iraq has the world’s second-largest oil reserves
– cannot be underestimated as a cause of the conflict in the Congo, or in
Iraq.)

While the number of casualties in the Congo may dwarf
those of the Iraq war, there is almost no outcry. After all, the world’s
superpower is not directly involved, nor are the economic giants of the Group
of 8. The skin color of the combatants on both sides is very dark, a not
insignificant fact when attempting to understand the vagaries of press coverage
or, for that matter, international concern. So while IRC finds out in the
Congo that “in 3 of the 10 health zones visited in the east, more than half
the children were dead before the age of two,” newspapers and TV stations
are silent and UN Security Council members find other things to put on their
agenda, and world leaders address crises that, curiously enough, never seem
to be related to what’s happening in the Congo.

Though strongly opposed to US intervention in Iraq, I
am prepared to acknowledge that the war was not the total disaster I had
anticipated. Casualties were ‘‘light’’, especially considering that US military
forces dropped a staggering tonnage of bombs on Iraqi cities, while a huge
array of missiles hit military targets close to, or in the middle of, civilian
districts. Reports from Iraq make clear that the predicted accuracy of these
weapons turned out to be valid. Modern engineering, sophisticated computers
and computerized circuitry, advanced videography and telemetry, all allowed
an explosive payload of almost incomprehensible size to be dropped with minimal
civilian casualties. War was mechanized to a degree never before seen in
human history – and the mechanization worked, at least in military terms.
It achieved ‘‘victory’’ by wiping out enemy positions and enemy personnel,
while leaving not just civilian populations, but a remarkable amount of urban
infrastructure, unharmed and intact.

There are, nonetheless, two dark roads into the future
that have been opened by the events of the recent war. The first is that
the conflict arose as an extension of modern imperialism: when the velvet
glove fails, the iron fist is always a final resort. The war was an imperialist
venture: at stake were control of oil Iraq’s reserves, the assigning of contracts
to develop those oil fields and pump the oil, the lucrative contracts to
reconstruct Iraq’s infrastructure with petro-dollars, and – lastly but certainly
important – control of an entire region which provides most of the world’s
oil. It was not Bush’s narrow-minded view of the world – that there are the
good guys, all allied with and subservient to the USA; and that there are
the adherents of evil, who can all be recognized by their opposition to US
interests and their tendency to speak languages other than English and worship
in buildings other than churches – which motivated the drive to make war
on Saddam. It was a desire for economic gain. Imperialism in the post-modern
age ends up looking like imperialism has always looked: it is a system which,
in the end, rests on armaments and armies – and a willingness to use them.

The second dark road is related to the first. The technology
of the war was so advanced that the war was rapid (a country subdued and
overwhelmed in three weeks) and victory was achieved with minimal loss of
American life. The war was an announcement to the world that those who do
not serve American interests risk finding themselves at the mercy of American
power. The war served to define that power is sudden, overwhelming, and technologically
advanced. The technology was frightening, at least to any nation (or its
inhabitants) which might one day be the object of the USA’s immense destructive
power.

The mechanization of warfare – from cannons to guns to
machine guns to airplanes to missiles to laser-guided weaponry – has proceeded
at an increasing rate since the invention of gunpowder. In this war, machines
guided by other machines delivered the destructive payloads at targets selected
by still other machines. Soldiers served, primarily, to back up the machines;
the primary ‘‘combatants’’ on the American side were people sitting in front
of video consoles 1,000 or 500 kilometers away from the place where destruction
was to be wrought. This was a war fought by technology, a war guided by remote
control – with the emphasis on ‘‘remote’’.

US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to deliver
a message: The USA will no longer shrink from using its military power because
it fears getting mired in a war of attrition, as was the case in Vietnam.
There will be minimal American casualties in future wars, because there will
be minimal American soldiers. The battlefield of the future will be automated
– a situation where the USA has the advantage, as it has the most advanced
machines.

Rumsfeld may yet be profoundly wrong in foreseeing an
American dominance enforced by technological superiority. Iraq was an easy
enemy, an unloved and corrupt dictatorship guarded by troops who fought not
for independence or survival but for money and perks Still, it is clear that
the Bush administration has sent out a terrifying message: Watch out, or
you may be next.

The war in the Congo is an ongoing catastrophe, regardless.
The nations of the world are meanwhile urged to march to the drumbeat of
a new military order, shaped by the remaining superpower and enforced by
a technology that threatens mechanized destruction to that superpower’s opponents.
We can each say, as Bertolt Brecht wrote in another period when imperial
ambitions were on the rise: “Truly, I live in dark times.”

Huck Gutman is a columnist for The Statesman in Kolkata, India and writes
regularly for Dawn in Karachi, Pakistan. He teaches at the University of
Vermont.